The best way to learn a platform is to use a platform Wow what a week it's been. First week back from vacation and I'm diving right into a sprint of stuff that needs to be delivered to the customer. My task for the week has been develop a connectivity layer between Salesforce and Dropbox using OAuth. This ...

Currency conversion in Apex While waiting for my flight in the lounge tonight I was playing around with currencies in Salesforce because - why not... Conversion between configured currencies are supported in SOQL and Salesforce but only between the configured corporate currency and ...

Salesforce week 25-27 and finishing this weekly thing... Wow!! A half year has gone by. Half a year... Where did the time go? Over the last weeks I've gradually noticed that my view on being with Salesforce has shifted from being "something new" to being "how things are". On feeling at home in the organisation ...

Salesforce Lightning Component API change As we get closer to Summer 17 we start using difference versions across production instances and sandboxes. This of course also leads to opportunities for differences in API's... I just found one such difference as I'd been developing some Lightning ...

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Re: The best way to learn a platform is to use a platformAs far as dev platforms go, I've been working with Polymer now for almost 2 years. And their tagline is "Use the Platform". Meaning, use the browser platform to do what it can do and does best whenever possible. That too goes to what you're ...

Re: Salesforce Lightning Components and image dependenciesOf course the Salesforce Lightning Design System is Salesforce agnostic but it's funny that the SLDS website only mention the SVG approach. I'll have to look into using the lightning:icon tag instead of the SVG custom component as that would definitely ...

I've previously blogged about the goodness of Trust Association Interceptors in Websphere Application Server (WAS) and how I've used it to turn the login procedure for IBM Connections on its head. We recently started upgrading the customer I originally developed this for to IBM Connections 3.0.1 hence they needed an upgrade to WAS 7. After upgrading the WAS servers the custom TAI didn't work anymore. The TAI loaded just fine but it didn't generate the needed LtpaToken2 for the visiting user. I cried out for help in the Connections forum. I got a few pointers but none of them helped me.

Fortunately I figured it out tonight.

The issue was that my custom TAI created subjects (a subject is the entity that holds the identity of the authenticated user in WAS) in a custom realm that wasn't trusted by WAS. The only trusted realm was the one that WAS created for me when I configured Federated Repositories. The solution was to add the custom realm as trusted under Federated Repositories, configure <my realm> and then go to "Trusted authentication realms - inbound". The entry is at the bottom under "Related Items". Here I simply added my realm as Trusted, restarted WAS and I was golden!! Again this wasn't necessary in WAS 6 and actually the option isn't there at all in ISC.

Now I'm back to thinking that WAS and TAI's are the best thing since sliced bread! :-)

There are some questions I get asked a lot by customers, colleagues and people I meet at conferences. One of them is why there isn't an easy way to copy links detected in Notes documents using LiveText to the clipboard. And I must admit that it is odd. To remedy I've actually developed a plugin that installs into Notes 8 to add an action item to links in Notes documents. After installing the plugin an action to the Copy Link Location to the clipboard is added to all links in the Notes client.

The plugin really highlights the power of Notes, LiveText and the plugin architecture in Notes. As you will probably recall - plugins are fun!!!

Besides that a right-click context menu is also added when right-clicking Notes documents to copy the Notes link (notes://) to the clipboard. It's all part of the same package.

When you install Websphere Application Server (WAS) either standalone or as a network deployment (ND) you normally install the Integrated Solutions Console (ISC) as well to allow you to configure and manage the server. By default the ISC is available on ports 9060/9443 and it not normally mapped onto an IBM HTTP Server (IHS) for access on ports 80/443. This makes it a real hazzle to access it so I normally change WAS to make ISC available on ports 80/443 on servers where port 80/443 isn't used. Doing so is really easy and only require a few changes. Below I have outlines the required changes.

In the left-hand menu go to "Environment / Virtual hosts" and select "admin_host" in the list. On the right select "Host Aliases", click "New" and add an entry for port 80 and one for port 443.

Now in the left-hand menu go to "System Administration / Deployment manager" and select "Ports". Now change the port for "WC_adminhost" from 9060 to 80 and "WC_adminhost_secure" from 9443 to 443.

Now save the configuration and restart the server or Deployment Manager running the ISC. When you access the ISC again it will be on http://hostname/ibm/console instead of http://hostname:9060/ibm/console.

As mentioned in my OSGi presentation at AusLUG OSGi is a key technology for you if you dabble in IBM/Lotus products. Among other things it forms the basis for Lotus Expeditor (and therefore Notes, Sametime and Symphony), XPages and the XPages Extensibility Library. OSGi is now also part of Java application servers such as Websphere Application and the free and open source JBoss AS 7. The JBoss AS7 OSGi Full Presentation + Demo highlights OSGi in JBoss and has a nice introduction to OSGi. Highly recommended.

"JBoss AS7 (jboss.org/​as7) is a game-changer for both Java EE developers as well as application server administrators. And while JBoss is best known for being a Java EE container, in this session, we will focus on the OSGi capabilities of the new JBoss AS7. Starting with background information on OSGi in general, Thomas Diesler introduces the main objectives of this technology and explains the unique JBoss OSGi vision. Combining the best of two worlds we show how modern Java EE applications on AS7 can use the OSGi component model and vice versa."

When I came into the office today I found a box on my desk with a nice letter attached to it. I wont go into detail but suffice it to say that the box contains some very nice stuff including a very nice WindStopper fleece jacket. Thank you IBM.

So I made it safely home from AusLUG with rather uneventful flights. On both flights I sat besides riders from the Australian Paralympic Team heading to the paralympic road bike World Championships in Denmark the week after next. Very cool.

A warm THANK YOU to the AusLUG organizing commitee and to all the atttendees that made the inaugural AusLUG a BIG success.